Xark!

Why Newt won SC: Hatred

 

There's been plenty of punditry on the topic of Newt's "surprise" win in the Palmetto State, but I think it's really quite simple. Bill Clinton won because he felt our pain. Newt Gingrich wins because he channels their hate.

My fellow South Carolinians hate a lot of things, including their prevailing belief that expressing one's hatred in public has been unfairly prohibited by political correctness. There are costs in 21st century America for publicly and explicitly hating blacks, gays, atheists, illegal immigrants, intellectuals and liberals, and so Southern conservatives have learned to speak in code: birth certificates, grades, teleprompters, food stamps, welfare, socialism. The code words express the outlines of their complaint, but not the seething anger that animates their politics.

Not only does Newt understand the immense power of repressed hatred, he also grasps that the one group Americans can still hate publicly without fear of reprisal is "The Media." Newt ran in South Carolina as The Guy Who Really Hates The Media, demonstrating to standing-ovation crowds that when it comes to hating, he's the man.

Of course, Newt has this one little problem nationally, but you know. Politics.

Next stop: Florida.

Romney & Ingraham, 1.20.12: Hoping for bad news

In case the media circus surrounding Newt Gingrich's win in South Carolina yesterday caused you to miss Laura Ingraham's Thursday's radio interview with Mitt Romney, here's a chance to catch up. It's a remarkable glimpse of the dilemma facing the Right today, regardless of its eventual nominee. I transcripted the full text of the most interesting exchange (emphasis mine):

INGRAHAM: Governor, the President and the Vice President, Secretary of the Treasury have said that, look, the economy is getting better, it's creating jobs month to month, it's not growing as fast as anyone wants but it's getting better. You've also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the President's argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying that it's getting better?

ROMNEY: Well of course it's getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession. There's always a recovery. There's never been a time anywhere in the world where an economy has never recovered. The question is, has it recovered by virtue of something the President's done, or has he delayed the recovery and made it more painful, and the latter is of course the truth.

The President's policies have made this recession deeper, and it made the recovery more tepid and difficult on the American people. This is the worst recovery we've seen from a recession since Hoover. And President Obama wants to take credit for things getting better. He in fact has made things worse. He's made this recovery take much longer.

But will our economy get better some day? Of course it will. And it will not be thanks to President Obama, it will be in spite of President Obama, and that's of course the message we have to give. If people think the right course for improving an economy is to massively expand debt and the federal government, why they can vote for Barrack Obama. But we know better.

INGRAHAM: But isn't it a hard argument to make if you're saying, like, OK, he inherited this recession, and he took a bunch of steps to try to turn the economy around, and now we're seeing some more jobs, but vote against him anyway? Isn't that a hard argument to make? Is that a stark enough contrast?

ROMNEY: Well, do you have a better one, Laura? (laughs) It just happens to be the truth. (laughs)

We're going to see the numbers in terms of how the economy does. It's very possible, by the way, that the economy will go into a decline again. I mean it's a... I can't tell you that I can predict that it's going to get better, but I think that ... at some point it's going to get better. But I don't think President Obama's helping it. He's been far less effective than he should have been at turning the economy around. I think if we'd elected John McCain we'd be in a much better position today. But do I think that the economy will get better at some point? Yeah. But you know by November of 2012 we'll see if it's gotten better or not.

The key for me is that if you look at what's happened to American employment, the reason that our unemployment rate has come down is because of the number of people who've dropped out of the base of workable, uh, the workforce. And him taking credit for people becoming so desperate that they drop out of the workforce altogether is a very weak position from which he'll be campaigning.

After months of effectively blaming the recession on Obama and "holding him accountable" for the nation's miseries, Republicans are now faced with an increasingly bleak landscape. An improving job market. Surprising growth in the manufacturing sector. Unemployment claims at a four-year low. "Twenty-two consecutive months of private-sector job growth," a White House figure I can't replicate from BLS data, but even its less-sexy alternate isn't bad: job growth for the past 15 consecutive months, and 18 out of the last 22. We added 1.6 million jobs in 2011, and the unemployment rate dropped from 9.1 to 8.5.

To make matters worse for the GOP, despite its hypnotic drumbeat of blaming Obama for everything, the public has consistently continued to acknowledge that our current economic conditions are something the President inheirited, rather than the result of his policies.

The Republican scorched-earth policy in 2010-11 succeeded in limiting the speed of the recovery and damaging Obama's approval ratings (though, interestingly enough, not his favorability ratings), but at an appalling high cost to the nation and the public's view of the GOP as a whole.

And now, after all of this, the economy is improving, the Republican primary season has produced nothing but the prospect of a protracted fight between two unpopular candidates, Occupy Wall Street shifted the national discussion from debt to income inequality, and more than 1 million people in Wisconsin have signed petitions to recall their Republican governor. Reince Priebus must be quietly losing his mind.

After framing 2012 as an economic question, the crisis for the GOP is that they can't publicly cheer against the economy, and the economic data is improving to the point that even their hyper-partisan media supporters can't ignore it. So while they'll cross their fingers and hope for bad news in the coming months, what do they do in the meantime? Based on Romney's response, perhaps they'll draw on a discordant note from the otherwise positive November 2011 jobs report: that the improvement was an accounting trick based on discouraged workers leaving the workforce.

That's not an entirely incorrect observation. Discouraged workers do drop out of the market, and the ratio of job openings to job-seekers remains above 4-to-1 for the third consecutive year. It's a tough recovery, following the worst recession since the Great Depression, which is why getting this stuff right is important.

But the bottom line on Romney's claim that "the reason that our unemployment rate came down is because of the number of people who have dropped out of... the workforce" is that he's flat wrong. The size of that workforce -- the number of Americans who are counted as employed or looking for work -- grew in 2011. Yes, there were month-to-month fluctuations, like the drop emphasized by Republicans in the controversial November jobs report, but the workforce grew again in December, even as the unemployment rate dropped for the fourth consecutive month.

By the Bureau of Labor Statistics' numbers, the Civilian Labor Force stood at 153,250,000 Americans in January 2011. By the end of December, that figure had risen to 153,887,000. That's an increase of 637,000 people. And despite having to include all those new people in the pool of workers, the national unemployment rate dropped by 0.6 percent.

But it gets worse for the GOP.

Republicans have spent three years dismissing out-of-hand any Democratic assessments of federal policies that included estimates of "jobs saved," instead favoring absolute numbers framed from their least-flattering perspective. By opening their critique to say that "Things are improving, but we would have done better," and moving away from their context-free assault on the President's economic numbers, they are moving onto a battefield in which the ground favors the Democrats.   

This doesn't mean Obama wins in the fall. But it does mean the planets are re-aligning.

Change

"I know you are taking it in the teeth, but the first guy through the wall... he always gets bloody... always. This is threatening not just a way of doing business... but in their minds, it's threatening the game. Really what it's threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It's threatening the way they do things... and every time that happens, whether it's the government, a way of doing business, whatever, the people who are holding the reins - they have their hands on the switch - they go batshit crazy."

-- John Henry to Billy Beane in "Moneyball."

Nation's cats dissatisfied with food, toys, sleeping arrangements

Owner approval ratings hit all-time low

Dec. 21, 2011

For Immediate release

By Frank Comment

TRENTON, NJ – A majority of America's cats* are disappointed with their quality of life, with 57 percent expressing displeasure with their food, 53 percent describing themselves as “bored” or “very bored” with their current collection of kitty toys, and 51 percent indicating that they are currently looking for a better place to sleep.

The key satisfaction numbers continued a downward trend in the annual Wall Street Journal/Cat Fancy Feline Opinion Survey, conducted Dec. 16-19 by Cat Dynamics Research Associates Inc. and funded by the I Can Haz Cheezburgers Charitable Trust.

The trend correlates to continuing declines in Cat Owner Approval Ratings, which have been in retreat since the Clinton Administration. Those ratings dipped to an historic low in the 2011 survey.

Next we have some questions about your relationship to your human staff. [RANDOM ORDER]

C. In general, how would you rate your human(s)'s overall job performance over the past 12 months?

This result renders a Composite Approval Index (CAI) of 40 percent, the worst CAI recorded in the 57 years since Cat Dynamics Research Associates added the question to its annual survey. The response was also the most negative ever recorded in the Waking Respondent Segment Measure (WRSM), with 89 percent of cats who happened to be awake at the time of the survey offering a negative assessment of their owner(s).

“America's cats are not amused,” said Isabelle C. Francis, President and CEO of Cat Dynamics Research. “To be more accurate about it, those who are awake are not amused. So far as we can tell.”

The poll was conducted by bothering 1,634 adult American cats between Dec. 16 and Dec. 19, 2011. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 50 percent.

Complete poll results here.

*Based on responses from cats that were able to wake up for or stay awake through survey interviews.

 

 

 

Divided government, Parte Deux (2012 Senate overview, with spreadsheet)

It's not exactly news that elections can be weird, but when it comes to U.S. Senate "classes," it's the norm. This has to do with Senators' six-year terms and the ups and downs of presidential and mid-term election cycles. 

Here's why: Only 33 of the 100 Senate seats are up for re-election in 2012, and because of those presidential/midterm cycles, there's a distinct rhythm to these things. This is Class I, which picked up eight seats in the notable 1994 Republican Revolution election. This meant that when it came time for Class I to stand election again in 2000, Republicans were defending more seats, and lost four of them, knotting the Senate at 50-50. Then in 2006, the Democrats went on a mid-term tear and gained six seats and 51-49 control of the Senate.

Which brings us to today. Heading into 2012, Class I consists of 23 Democrats and 10 Republicans. From a political science perspective, that means Democrats are on the defensive, because a 23-10 majority means there just aren't that many seats to be gained, and lots of seats to protect .

Kindle Fire & "direct-to-consumer" marketing

Martin Langeveld (Neiman/Harvard) came out this morning with a big prediction for the new Amazon Fire tablet:

The advent of the Kindle Fire will impact every business engaged in advertising, from your local weekly newspaper to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, and Groupon, because it will vastly accelerate the transformation to direct-to-consumer marketing by merchants, manufacturers, and service providers, without the traditional interpolation of advertisements to drive buyers to sellers.

It's a good piece, worth reading.

But there's a logic to commercial information in this Media Interregnum that I need to keep emphasizing, because it's as true now as it was when I began beating this drum six years ago.

1. Advertising (renting the attention of consumers to sellers) puts publishers in the business of representing the interest of the seller;
2. As consumer attention fragments and advertising becomes ubiquitous, basic market principles will continue to drive down the ad rates that publishers receive;
3. Commercial media saturation creates a new problem for buyers.They need help cutting through the low-value sales-pitch clutter to find products (CNET) and services (Angie's List) that actually suit their individual needs;
4. Businesses that recognize this opportunity move from representing the interests of the seller (help me sell the thing I want to sell) to representing the interests of the buyer (help me select the right thing for me).
5. By adding the option of moving directly from research to purchasing ("My Shopping Cart"), businesses generate revenue by adding value for the user (comparing products in useful ways), the seller (providing quality commercial information about the seller's product)  and both buyer and seller (by handling the transaction). The result is a virtual marketplace in which a share of every transaction belongs to the business that brings buyer and seller together;.
6. Internet-era businesses following this logic have created successful digital marketplaces for products that are the same no matter where you buy them (Amazon), products that can be hard to find in your town (HuckNroll), discounted products (O.co), and products that can be shipped cheaply and returned easily (Zappos); 
7. The challenge for publishers who serve specific physical communities (news of interest only to this town or that one) is to organize efficient, tailored virtual marketplaces for brick-and-mortar businesses in those communities. These transactions are often more complex than buying books online, but they are also more valuable because they are more complex;
8. To capture that value, local publishers must shift from publishing and structuring information solely on behalf of sellers and put the user at the center of their business model. Only then can they create marketplaces in which they receive a cut of every transaction;
9. Doing this will not only create a more profitable business model, it will improve the trust that individual users give to the non-commercial information a publisher provides;
10. And, finally, by doing this, they will begin to reap higher advertising rates. Because if you're a car dealer, whose attention do you really want to rent? The person who just wants to watch a ball game, or the person who is -- today, right now -- actively looking to buy a car?

What is truly conservative?

This is Henry Wallace, a Republican businessman, agricultural scientist and newspaper editor who -- despite his party affiliation -- became Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Secretary of Agriculture in 1933. For more than seven years, Wallace did that job so well that Roosevelt named him as his as his vice-presidential running mate in 1940. Had it not been for a revolt among Democratic delegates at their 1944 convention, Vice President Wallace would have become the 33rd President of the United States instead of Harry S. Truman.

There are all sorts of interesting facts about Wallace, an Iowan whose research into crop yields changed the way we grow corn today and later led to the first genetic corn hybrids, which have done wonders to increase food production around the world.

But here's what's truly remarkable about the man from my perspective. As Wallace arrived in Washington in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression, America's heartland had become a radical place. Midwestern farmers had been suffering through their own recession for years before the stock crash in 1929, and the Depression only made their already desperate crisis worse. By the time Wallace took office, American farmers -- generally considered then as now a practical and conservative bunch -- were on the brink of open, violent rebellion. Not right-wing rebellion, mind you. Left-wing, socialist, communist rebellion.

On writing, and other forms of bullshit

Once upon a time, maybe as recently as 2006, I loved writing. I'd always hoped to earn my living by putting words together, and to be a professional writer and editor, in a community of professional writers and editors, thrilled me. Sometimes it thrilled me several times a week.

For instance, in 2000 I helped launch an anonymous newspaper column called Good Morning Lowcountry, which ran half a page, seven days a week, in The (Charleston) Post and Courier. GMLc was the work of no single writer in its early years, so several of us shared the duties, churning through local topics and mild obsessions and odd bits of Lowcountry trivia like a pack of raccoons rooting through trailer park garbage cans. Every now and then we'd even pause between deadlines to talk about the experience and its process, prompting me once to write a GMLc with the self-absorbed subhead "This Writing Life," in which I attempted to share the good-humored, arty, third-person-objective camaraderie of it all.

Now, of course, I just wish everyone would shut up and get on with it.

There is no more thoroughly boring topic than writing, and if you doubt this, listen to a public radio interviewer ask a Famous Author to talk about his or her process, or even worse, his or her deeper thoughts on language or storytelling..

The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger (script)

 

If you haven't seen this one before, where have you been? And even if you have seen it, you might not have noticed how it's taken over the world, selling more T-shirts than Old Navy and prompting half the people in America under the age of 30 to say at least once, "honey badger don't care." Based solely on his access to the brains of our young, this guy Randall, who does new voiceovers for old nature videos, is one of the most influential men in the United States.

But what else does he say? Since I couldn't find a script online, I decided to transcribe it. So I do all the work, like the honey badger, and you come around and pick up the scraps."Thanks for the script, stupid!"

This is the honey badger. Watch it run in slow motion.

It's pretty badass. Look. It runs all over the place. "Whoa! Watch out!" says that bird.

Eew, it's got a snake! Oh! It's chasing a jackal! Oh my gosh!

Intent, art and the 21st century

So it was that in April of 1970 an artist named Lawrence Weiner typed up a work of art that appeared in Arts Magazine -- as a work of art -- with no visual experience before or after whatsoever, and to wit:

1. The artist may construct the piece
2. The piece may be fabricated
3. The piece need not be built

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership

And there, at last, it was! No more realism, no more representational objects, no more lines, colors, forms, and contours, no more pigments, no more brushstrokes, no more evocations, no more frames, walls, galleries, museums, no more gnawing at the tortured face of the god Flatness, no more audience required, just a "receiver" that may or may not be a person or may or may not be there at all, no more ego projected, just "the artist" in the third person, who may be anyone or no one at all, for nothing is demanded fo him, nothing at all, not even existence, for that got lost in the subjunctive mode -- and in that moment of absolutely dispassionate abdication, of insouciant withering away, Art made its final flight, climbed higher and higher in an ever-decreasing tighter-turning spiral until, with one last erg of freedom, one last dendritic synapse, it disappeared up its own fundamental aperture... and came out the other side as Art Theory!... Art Theory pure and simple, words on a page, literature undefiled by vision, flat, flatter, Flattest, a vision inivisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls.

-- Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975

The tragedy of re-reading Wolfe's short masterpiece today, 29 years after I first encountered it, is its sad failure in predicting the future of artistic taste. Back in the mid-seventies, The Man in the White Suit felt confident that the world would come to its senses by the year 2000, that artists and collectors and writers would look back on the artistic period 1945-1975 with head-shaking wonder. "What happy hours await them all!" he wrote. "With what sniggers, laughter and good-humored amazement will they look back upon the era of the Painted Word!"

Sadly, Old Tom failed to appreciate the gravity of our 20th century intellectual failures, for we remain incapable of escaping their black-hole pull. The Grand Duchy of Art Theory that Wolfe skewered wasn't some post-war aberration: it was an Event Horizon, a point-of-no-return from which a once-cohesive culture doesn't simply recover. From art to literature to political science, the intellectuals of the mid-to-late 20th century pursued abstraction for the sake of theoretical purity, rendered their fields impotent and irrelevant, and then hid the keys to understanding within an arcane codex of self-referential gibberish that only members of their self-selecting academy could hope to understand.

It is this reason more than any other -- more than mass media, more than politics, more than economics, science or religion -- that accounts for the fraying of our current culture. As I wrote in 2005:

Transparency journalism: an FAQ

If the news industry is going to explore transparency as an alternative to the “journalistic objectivity” claim to credibility (and yes, as a matter of fact, we are), then this big idea is going to have to confront a series of small questions. Thank goodness we can begin answering them.

What's wrong with objectivity?

First, we all need to agree on something important. Scientific objectivity is an experimental condition that limits observation so that the collected data will be identical for all observers (and, if managed properly, repeatable in multiple trials). Journalistic objectivity is an assumed perspective that includes a set of variable practices, but is essentially a subjective claim to credibility.

The problem with that credibility claim is that Americans don't believe it. A Gallop poll in September found that 57 percent of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. That's a record low for this Gallop question, and it reflects a decades-long declining trend that others have noticed as well.

Reading William Irwin Thompson

Paradoxically, for my generation, one that came of age in the revolutionary spirit of the affluent 1960s, liberation from institutions and their systems of meanings was not a relationship with a specific oppressive condition but a general, eternal, and absolute value in and of itself. In challenging the rhetoric of Western Civilization, the generation that mocked the bourgeois liberal pieties of its fathers and mother rather smugly took for granted a niave and simpleminded faith in revolt against all forms of authority and enduring value. And, as always seems to be the case in the world of fashion, the French led the way. Roland Barthes announced "The Death of the Author" and tore down this idol of literate civilization; Michel Foucault exposed the "episteme" that bound institutions and forms of knowing into the "discourse" that was itself the system of domination; and Derrida made certain, with an ultimate Deconstruction, that no text would ever rise up again with a pretense to ultimate meaning, or high-minded and high-handed final authority. For an affluent and expanding bureaucracy of academic literary critics and behavioral scientists, this demolishing of the mystique of the solitary romantic artist who could pretend to cosmic knowledge without the necessary university credentials was indeed welcome news, and without much regret the culture of Author-hood and Authority was shouldered aside. "Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes futile... We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." 

Reading Louis Menand: Commercializing anti-commercialism

"Nearly all American culture is commercial. It is either market-driven, as in the case of popular music, paperback fiction, and movies; or it is advertising-driven, as in the case of radio television, newspapers and magazines. And this culture is, of course, only an aspect of the American way of life generally, in which virtually every good – food, housing, furniture, clothing, cars, shaving creams – is understood to be designed to extract the greatest possible profit from the market conditions available, and to be susceptible to alteration the instant those conditions change. Because it is the chief tool for making conditions change, thereby creating new areas of demand and new sources of profit, advertising has become for most people the symbol of the thoroughgoing commercialism of American life.

We are the Founding Fathers (& Mothers, too!)

There are several ways to measure the length of continuous Chinese civilization, but for the sake of discussion, lets set the beginning point for China at the establishment of the first unified Chinese state. That would be the Qin Dynasty, which began in 221 BC, giving us 2,232 years of China as an evolving cultural identity and political reality.

And with that in mind, ask yourself this question:

Would anyone in China today argue that only the ideas expressed during the 15-year run of the founding Qin Dynasty should be counted as valid statements of the Chinese ideal? Would anyone in their right mind conclude that only the Qins should count as the founding fathers of China?

The worst thing about the paywall question

Like a lot of people in the news business, I'm interested in the results of 2011's big bets on paywalls -- the New York Times version and Rupert Murdoch's Times of London version. We're several months in, and I still haven't seen much of substance.

Which was why I jumped on this piece when API's SmartBrief service led with it on June 27. But does the reporting it contains really justify the headline "Murdoch's Leap Finds Converts in Cannes as Paywall Use Grows?" Read it. I'll be here when you get back.

(Tap tap tap tap...)

Kerosene Journalism & the quest for the atom

Since the new-media conventional wisdom machine is having another loose conversation about the “atomic unit” of journalism (thank you, Jeff Jarvis, for kicking this one off), let's use this fleeting moment of attention to advance the subject toward its ultimate destination.

Future journalists are going to be in the information business, not specifically the storytelling business, or the analysis business, or the Tweeting business, or the liveblogging business. What separates the information contained in all these existing journalistic forms from the journalism that will be valuable in the future, is that the future will require us to store the new information we report in ways that are efficiently usable by computers.

So thank you, Mr. Jarvis, for pointing out that quality reporting need not result in an article. Thank you, Jonathan Glick, for noting that mobile interfaces are changing the way we consume news. Thank you, Amy Gahran, for saying that we need better word-processing and browser tools. These aren't exactly new ideas (Jarvis, Gahran and many others have been making similar points off and on for years now), but the recent cascade of discussion makes this a noteworthy moment.

The flaw in this line of conversation is that it ends at the water's edge, by the banks of a river of change that separates the confused state of modern journalism from a future that may offer astounding rewards.

2011 GOP strategies, in summary

Let's review:

Gin-up Birtherism controversies via right-wing media? Obama releases birth certificate, makes them all look like whack-jobs. 

Crap! Quick, get on Fox and raise some doubts about the legitimacy of the document! The latest polls show that only 3 percent of Americans still doubt that President Obama was born in the U.S., despite skeptical coverage of the event on Fox and other conservative media. Obama campaign sells birth certificate T-shirts and coffee mugs as a fund-raiser.

Fetishize the deficit and blame it on Obama? Resulting media attention points out that $7 trillion of current debt came from Dubya, and only $1.7 came from Obama -- who spent stimulous money to end the Bush recession's slide to disaster. Also reminds people that before Bush took over in 2001, the federal budget was on track to eliminate the entire national debt by 2008. Ouch.

FOX News' historic mistake

Here's a large statement with scanty evidence, yet one I believe nonetheless: 21st century media historians will record that the decline of Fox News Channel as a dominant force in right-wing politics began on May 16, 2011.

Not that Fox is showing any particular signs of immediate weakness. It dominates its two cable news competitors in most meaningful measures, and essentially owns the conservative news brand in America. Conventional wisdom says that Fox – which holds the distinction of being simultaneously the country's most trusted and least trusted TV news channel – will be a dominant player in the news business for the foreseeable future.

 But sniff around Fox for a while and see if you don't catch a whiff of decay.

Rethinking advertising... in 2005

Author's note: What follows is a lightly edited version of a white paper report I gave my bosses at The Post and Courier newspaper in December 2005, describing an approach to 21st century news media and advertising that Steve Buttry (who developed his version independently in 2007) and Chuck Peters would later name C3, for Complete Community Connection. I first blog-published this text in September 2006, because I was shocked that nothing had come of it. Five years later, I'm not shocked. Things were moving rapidly in the web world in 2005, but things do not move rapidly in the news media industry.

For the record, The Post and Courier bosses who received this white paper never invited me to discuss it with them.

Readers, buyers and users
The print-newspaper business model is contradictory and more than a little confusing: We attract readers by covering news, which they pay to read. But the heart of our businesslies with sellers, for whom we deliver the attention of buyers via advertising. This is a conflict. For our brand to be valuable, readers must see it as independent of advertiser interests. To keep that reader trust, traditional newspapers have long erected “firewalls” between their news and advertising and editorial departments.

But we have a secret: Those firewalls come with built-in doors and windows. For all our talk about independence, no newspaper wants its editorial department to go around casually angering advertisers. Sure, we do it, but we don’t do it lightly. Not for long. And when we do, even for the best of reasons, we hear about it from those advertisers.

The danger in the doldrums

This morning's day-off multi-tasking: watching coverage of the horrible 8.9 earthquake in Japan while reading my various feeds, which included finally taking on the Bill Keller column about aggregation. It includes this passage in the ultimate graph:

There is no question that in times of momentous news, readers rush to find reliable firsthand witness and seasoned judgment. (In the first hour after Mubarak fell, The Times’s Web site had an astounding one million page views, and friends at other major news organizations tell me they enjoyed a similar surge.) I can’t decide whether serious journalism is the kind of thing that lures an audience to a site like The Huffington Post, or if that’s like hiring a top chef to fancy up the menu at Hooters. But if serious journalism is about to enjoy a renaissance, I can only rejoice. Gee, maybe we can even get people to pay for it.

So here's a thought question: How many "times of momentous news" do we experience in a typical month? With the exception of you news junkies (and you know who you are), how often do you hear something that sends you rushing to your top media channels to find out more?

I don't have answers to that, other than to say "not that often."

Which points to an overlooked problem in media: If you get most of your attention on days when people are urgently paying attention to an event, but you make your money by selling ads on less-interesting content day after routine day, what does that do to the way you structure and value your newsroom resources?

The future, on the cheap

I read a post yesterday about a profitable hyperlocal news site, and here's my summary: the owners hold down costs by paying freelancers to write articles. Their secret sauce, apparently, is that unlike similar hyperlocal formulas being pushed by Patch and The New York Times, The Alternative Press doesn't waste money on unnecessary expenses - you know, frivilous journalism stuff, like hiring editors.

Result? They've got their overhead down to a triumphant $0.28 per unique user.

“We're the only profitable hyperlocal here today and our business model works,” founder Michael Shapiro told an MIT enterprise forum late last month.

So, let's review.

21st century jargon: a list

Jargon is one of those things that gets a bad rap from journalists, and writers in general, because it's an evolved specialization of speech. When our lives require new terms to describe the issues we face on a daily basis, we create them. This specialization quickly distinguishes groups from the general population, which is why writers avoid jargon: it limits the audience for their work.

Here's a list I compiled while working as a consultant last year. I imagined a younger, college-educated me, teleported through time from 1985 into the meetings I was attending, and every time I heard a phrase that 1985-me would have tripped over or misinterpreted in its new context, I wrote it down.

Advertising is not enough

The ongoing death throes of TBD, a Washington-based local news site that launched in April, attract my attention because a talented friend of mine joined the venture last spring. I remember wishing him well in a coffee shop 11 months ago while thinking “I've got a bad feeling about this.”

Here's why, and it's not a complex answer. TBD, like practically every other for-profit media business in America, relies on advertising to pay its bills. The pitch for Web-only news ventures like TBD is that they'll turn a profit on low revenues because they come without the legacy costs of their newspaper-backed Web competitors.

What gets overlooked in these proposals is just how low those revenues typically turn out to be. Despite a rebound from their crash in 2009, Web ad rates remain so dismal that it's difficult to make money producing journalistic content online even when your company's main expense is newsroom payroll.

An FAQ for my semantic journalism essay

Since several readers yesterday seem to struggle with some of the big-picture concepts in my essay about standards-based journalism in a semantic economy, I'm taking this opportunity to build a better cognitive bucket for all this information I'm shoveling your way. And it seems like the big problem is understanding what RDF is and how it might work in this context.

Rather than doing this in essay form, I'm going to try it as an FAQ.

Standards-based journalism in a semantic economy

Abstract: This 2,600-word essay describes how a news-media industry equipped with semantic tools could develop a standards-based certification program for journalism. Certification would be by non-governmental bodies similar to the ISO, and would focus on information processing and coding standards rather than on matters of ethics. The effect of such a standard would enable interoperability between semantic directories, which would allow for the creation of software that compares facts and checks the accuracy of statements.It is the second in a series of essays about semantic media. Since some readers had difficulty imagining the system, I've added an FAQ for these ideas, and added descriptions to the links listed at the end.

There's nothing exciting or romantic about standards. Personally, I find them tedious.

There, I've said it.

But there's no happy and profitable future for journalism without professional standards, and for that future we should be willing to sweat a little tedium. If my conclusions are correct, then our emerging information-based global economy will require interchangeable, robust data in the same way that our current economy requires that every finely threaded quarter-inch screw must have 28 threads per inch, machined to precisely the same height and pitch and thread-axis angle, regardless of whether the screw is manufactured in the People's Republic of China or Alpharetta, Ga.

Manufacturers of products that require screws need to know not only that the fasteners they buy are machined to precise dimensions and specifications, but that the tolerance of the machining and the durability of the materials fall within known quality standards. This generic uniformity makes it possible for manufacturers around the world to compete primarily on cost, and it works because manufacturers voluntarily abide by standards that were published and certified by international bodies.

If we are to benefit from a global semantic economy, then the information that fuels its industries and drives its markets must be structured, coded, stored, published and quality-certified to international standards. This is a foreseeable future (one among many), because we now possess the tools and techniques required to build the first platform that would make semantic markup of narrative documents a profitable, persistent revenue stream across the publishing industry. So long as the value of these resources continues to expand, we can expect to see voluntary participation in these activities, with resulting increases in productivity and organization.